Johnson tasks CTO members to turn rhetoric into broadband

DigitalSENSE Business News
Remmy Nweke/

 

Nigerian Minister of Communication Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson, has reiterated the need to correct imbalances in access to connectivity by turning ‘rhetoric into broadband’ among member countries of Commonwealth Telecommunication Organisation (CTO).

Johnson in her closing address to 11th annual CTO forum in Abuja, made available to DigitalSENSE Business News noted that by redressing the imbalances, the poor and unconnected would be released from the bondage of marginalisation.

“We have also considered the challenges of rolling out the very expensive infrastructure this technology needs, of managing scarce resources to ensure ubiquitous, reasonably priced access,” she said.

According to her more concerted and well thought out efforts must be made to bring the previously unconnected to the Internet, just as aggressive roll out is canvassed.

She pointed out that motivating research in various aspects of human language technology such as speech synthesis, speech recognition, natural language understanding and machine translation for human-human and human-machine communication in none-traditional languages will help close the “last six inches of the last mile.”

Organizations like the ITU and CTO, she noted, would also be key to formulating policies and helping bring well-placed pressure to bear on the globally popular applications and Internet services that will ultimately benefit the most from the high speed access that want citizens and their customers to have.

This, she said, would help to harness relatively untapped resources, badly needed to bridge one of the most basic portions of the digital divide, that of inadequate infrastructure.

... Making SENSE of digital revolution!
Pix: Prof. Tim Unwin, Secretary General of CTO